The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for acquiring document information and using the document information to determine if the document is being electronically stored as a duplicate and providing a notification of such.
Digital archiving of hard copy documents is being widely used. With the increased usage of computers, increased storage capacities of data storage systems and devices, and increased speeds of computing devices, such digital archiving is becoming more prevalent as organizations migrate from paper based organizations to paperless by converting physical hard copy documents to an electronic form. Typically, such physical hard copy documents are converted to electronic form by way of a scanning process using a scanner device or the like.
In large scale organizations, it may often be the case that the same documents may be archived several times in several different storage locations. Such situations are more prevalent in large scale organizations because individuals are less likely to interact with one another on document storage issues and the storage systems have many more storage locations where documents can potentially be stored resulting in less likelihood that a particular individual will know what documents are stored in each possible storage location of the storage system. While storage capacities are greatly increased, such duplicate storage of documents in archives represents a waste of resources that would be beneficial to avoid.